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All good things must come to and end. Also, the Twilight movies must come to an end. At least for the next five years until they are remade with Angelina Jolie’s offspring. As a critic, I feel it’s kind of moot to even try and review the latest and final installment in the franchise because nothing I say or think about the movie will have even the slightest effect on the target audience for the film which includes scores and scores of palpitating teenage girls and their middle aged mothers who live and die by the love legend that is Bella and Edward. I don’t get it (I didn’t even like the books, to be honest, and only made it through part of the first one), so I suppose I am meant to live a life outside the bask and shine that is Twilight. Whatever.
The best thing I can say about this closing chapter of the saga is that it has a lot of action in it, which mercifully replaces the non-acting faces of the first three movies that were filmed to show us what teenage moping looks like in slow motion. There is a fierce battle brewing between the goodies and baddies (more specifically, the Cullen clan and the Volturi) and the epic battle feels a lot more like Narnia than Lord of the Rings.
For all its mix of fantasy, adventure, and the supernatural, the whole saga has felt quite mundane and even cliched. I won’t go the easy route of bashing Kristen Stewart’s questionable acting skills or Robert Pattinson’s obvious disinterest or even Taylor Lautner’s inability to keep his shirt on. All of these things are upheld by fans as proof of the series’ awesomeness. I witnessed none of it, and was glad to have lived my teen years alongside Harry, Hermione, and Ron, instead of this dreadful trio. I know: pooh pooh on me.
The saga essentially boils down to two crudely distilled concepts: how two people managed to refrain from “doing it” because one would die if she was penetrated by a vampire, and how teenage boys have a very, very hard time trying to abstain from sex with their pale girlfriends (unless he’s born-again or gay, which is ironic). Of course, none of it matters in the end because Bella and Edward end up precisely where we expect them to, and a few slashings and fang marks never really hurt anyone anyway. If this isn’t tripe, I don’t know what is.
MORE: View photos from various red carpet premieres here >>>
